I don't know what it is that attracts them to it. I know it may sound a bit elitist but I have heard/read that it has to do with "folk religion"
in an essentially rural and post-pagan context never entirely extirpated by church authorities. But that doesn't really explain all the blood, does it?

There are a lot of odd things in popular Catholic piety that I don;t understand and which tend to turn me off.

The infant of Prague, for example, what the hell is this? Worshiping Jesus as a toddler all wrapped up in queenly regalia complete with a little crown. Not
particularly bloody, but a little disturbing. I imagine hosts of little old Bohemian ladies weeping and crossing themselves, pining for their lost babies in an
era and area of high infant mortality rates.

There is a Slovak Catholic Church which every Holy Week trots out a life sized statue of Jesus right after the scourging and puts it right in the very front of
the Chancel so you have to walk up to it when you go up to receive communion:

I've never been in a Catholic Church where there was a gory crucifix in the front, with slabs of flesh hanging off and Jesus dirty and red with His own
blood.

The crucifix in our church was taken down and painted brown to match the woodwork, interestingly. I'm not sure why. It's being restored to its original
colors at the moment, which means that Jesus will again look like He's just returned from a nice bath, and refreshed his loincloth and blow-dried his hair
for the iconographers.

Because that's how He really must have looked after being up all night and half a day of torture.

I think the babdists might be the ones denying one of the two natures, iconoclasts that they are, and prefer to just think of Him as a spiritual being with no
body to torture (or rise from the dead, for that matter). Religion's much more pleasant that way.

I think the babdists might be the ones denying one of the two natures, iconoclasts that they are, and prefer to just think of Him as a spiritual being with no
body to torture (or rise from the dead, for that matter). Religion's much more pleasant that way.

i noted specifically that catholics say that

Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.

I've been thinking about this. It is almost completely absent from English Catholicism but I don't really know that it's a matter of the
Englishness of their Catholicism so much as the fact that Catholicism is (or was until recently) a minority faith in England and therefore tuned to a more
Anglican aesthetic. Similarly German and French Catholicism, so heavily influenced by the baroque, have a very different flavor...these being burgher
societies.

Protestantism is almost entirely devoid of this, but then, Protestantism developed in an age of Scholarship and folk-religion is an after-development, a kind
of messy, mongoloid child of biblicism mixed with fanaticism mixed with nutter ideas about the apocalypse and piety. For Protestants folk religion is about
wacky ideas, the iconography (see SDA grotesque or the covers of various millenarian books) serves the ideas.

Folk religion during the formative years of Catholicism was quite different, darkened groves dedicated to a particular tutelary diety where blood rituals were
done, etc. Very dark, very spooky. Whether this directly influenced the grotesque iconography we're talking about would be hard to say, but it remains that
the environment was one much more prone to public drama and objectification.

Maybe there is something there...morality plays and so on bringing Christ and his passion to the unwashed masses in as dramatic and as violent a way as
possible and a certain variety of low caste iconography stems from it.

That you believe Catholics, generally, gravitate toward blood and gore? But yet this isn't displayed in most Catholic Churches? Is it that bloody, gory
crucifixes are displayed in private Catholic homes?

Really?

In the circles I run in, private adoration and imagery preference looks more like this

If Catholics were really more turned on by blood and gore, The Front Porch might have had a different clientele, especially during its swan song. But wait, I
just remembered it was orchestrated by a Catholic. Maybe you have a point after all. At least about *some* Catholics.